Work-Life Innovation |

This is the latest update of my Adventures in Personal Outsourcing series. The conclusion of my interactions with my Virtual Assistant that I found at Guru.com actually took place not long after my last post on this subject, but I have only gotten round to posting the update now. My Bad! Anyway, I can say that my experiment with Personal Outsourcing has been very good indeed. Apart from my initial difficulties in finding a VA that would do the work at other, more well know VA companies (notably YourManInIndia.com, and GetFriday.com), once I found Guru.com the offers from VA’s to do the work were plentiful. I chose a lady from India who agreed to post all of my books onto Amazon.co.uk for $25 or about £12.

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In my other blog writing gig at Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog, I recently posted an article explaining how to find out what the Web knows about you and suggest a way to set about controlling that information. In the article I explain a DIY approach to identity management and a more extensive approach using a new startup called Garlik. Here’s a snippet from the article:

“In this day and age it’s becoming ever more important to manage the perceptions that others have of us. This is even more true in an age of ubiquitous media, social networking, insta-uploads, tagging and blogging. Before you know it, that heat of the moment comment or deed can be captured by someone’s digital camera or video and broadcast out to the whole world via, Facebook, twitter, or blog posts. And once it’s out there it’s out there for good. Understanding how much of ourselves is online for public viewing is itself difficult to determine - who has time to trawl all the social networking sites trying to track down any personal content we may have had ’shared’ to the world by our unwitting friends (or ‘witting’ [is that a word?] foes).”

Here is a link to the full post.

Way back in April, I posted about how I was going to find a personal assistant to list on Amazon all the old books I wanted to get rid of. The basic idea was to test out this whole personal outsourcing idea with a task that was easy to do, but time consuming for me. I hoped it would at least pay for itself and perhaps make a little bit of cash. I supplied the ISBN’s of a set of old books I wanted to get rid of, and asked for whoever was to do the job to find the books on Amazon and list my books 5% cheaper than the going rate for a used copy already listed.

Since then I have put up the details of the task on several websites, such as Your Man in India, Get Friday and DoMyStuff, all to no avail The sites either never got back to me, or the task is still listed with no takers for the job. Undeterred, I found another site called Guru.com where I posted the task again. The very next day I had close to 50 people bidding to do the work! The bids ranged from $20 to $200(!?), coming from places like the US, India, the Philippines, and Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

In some cases less really is more. As you all no doubt are very much aware, there is a glut of data out there and the question is no longer how do I get the right information, but rather when do I stop looking at the data so that I can act? In my days as a grad student I remember spending months reading around my subject looking for an angle that would give me my thesis topic. The trouble was there was just too much to cover, and every article led to five more. I felt I never had enough information to make a decision about where to put my stake in the ground and formulate my thesis topic. This went on through most of the first year until my supervisor took me aside and told me to stop reading and start thinking! It was the right advice. Read the rest of this entry »

I love books and I tend to buy a lot of them. Looking back over my last four months of Amazon purchases for books, I see that I have bought 15 books. Add to this the ones I buy when shopping at the weekends and your looking at around 25 books in the last 4 months alone! That’s a lot of reading. In fact, in my garage I must have around 60-70 books stored away in bags and boxes. However, this is only a small fraction of the books I have ever owned. I have lost count of the number of books I have jettisoned over the years, usually when I’m about to move house or apartment - books are heavy!

In the past I would always just take the books down to the local Oxfam shop, but I think next time I am going to try something different! Read the rest of this entry »